It’s the hardest sell: valuing a salesman

Businesses would be lost without the people we love to disdain, writes Carly Chynoweth

Cleaning up: good sales people win over customers to the firm (R Gates)

Phineas Barnum was a brilliant salesman. The 19th-century impresario had a knack for showmanship and a relaxed attitude to honesty. Put these two features together and you have the stereotype for what people dislike about the profession.

Even those who rely on sales people for their own success — business leaders and other professionals — are inclined to look down on them, or at least fail to give their skills any real acknowledgement, said Philip Delves Broughton, author of the book Life’s a Pitch: What the World’s Best Sales People Can Teach Us All.

He noticed this several years ago when he was studying for an MBA at Harvard Business School and realised that few of his classmates knew anything about selling.

“These were people who otherwise had great careers. They could put together spreadsheets and marketing plans and business strategies until they were blue in the face. But the idea of having to sell something gave them real pause for thought,” he said.

In his book, Delves Broughton describes what happened when his friend Christopher Coleridge — the founder of V-Water, a drink brand now owned by Pepsico — sat next to a lawyer or a banker at dinner and described himself as a salesman. They were patronising, as if sales people were the dispensable foot soldiers of business.

“But really it’s the highly paid managers who are the dispensable ones,” Delves Broughton said. “The sales people, as long as they are managing the customer relationship, are invaluable.” For most customers, in fact, the sales people are the only part of a business with which they have a relationship.

More business people should understand this, said Delves Broughton, who was born in Bangladesh, grew up in England and now lives in America. “The fact that sales people are so disparaged is astounding, because if they are not doing their job properly, your company won’t happen.

“Good sales people create an understanding — a notion of value around your product or service in the mind of your customers — and that is a real skill. The business world would not exist without these people.”

Non-sales people would do well to remember that there’s an awful lot of selling going on in business beyond the pitches to customers, he added. “Think about the modern chief executive, for example. What’s his or her job? Really it is HR and sales. If you are the chief executive of a public company, your job is to get out there and sell the idea that your company is a success to markets, to investors, to staff and so on ... But then think about where sales and HR are in the academic and business hierarchies — it’s quite low.”

Sales people are also treated as “a breed apart” when it comes to how they are paid, with commission-based systems the norm. It is as if companies believe they will not work unless they are offered big financial incentives, Delves Broughton said. “But there is room to be much more sophisticated. If you run a highly transactional business, perhaps you can work like that. But if you depend on 18-month cycles, for example, you need sales people who are comfortable building long-term relationships with customers.”

Chief executives need to decide what sort of salesforce they want and act accordingly. That is, they should acknowledge that they can shape the way in which their sales people behave — that there is not some natural law that sales people care only about a quick financial reward.

“If there is bad sales behaviour, it is because something at the top is set up very badly,” said Delves Broughton. “There is nothing inherent in sales people that encourages bad behaviour; it’s all about the context they are in. We all have these ideas about what a sales person is, but actually there are as many different sales people as there are any [other types of worker].”

Take Nelson Mandela. He is a natural salesman who put his gifts to the ending of apartheid and making his time in prison more bearable, Delves Broughton said. “If you are squeamish about using sales techniques, look at people like Mandela, or the Dalai Lama, who use them for good ends.”